Galaxy
Cigar Galaxy (M82)
In Ursa Major (UMa) • Magnitude 8.4 • 11 arcminutes
Open the free AstroPlanner with Cigar Galaxy pre-selected, scored against your telescope, location, and the live cloud forecast.
A galaxy in the throes of a starburst, forming new stars about 10 times faster than the Milky Way, driven by tidal interactions with M81. Its core expels hot gas and dust in a dramatic "superwind" — glowing red filaments shooting hundreds of thousands of light-years above and below the galactic disk.
Cigar Galaxy at a glance
| Catalog IDs | M82, N 3034 |
| Type | Galaxy |
| Constellation | Ursa Major (UMa) |
| Right ascension | 09h 55m 55s |
| Declination | +69° 40' 48" |
| Apparent magnitude | 8.41 |
| Surface brightness | 12.7 mag/arcsec² |
| Angular size | 11.0 × 4.3 arcmin |
| Max altitude at 45°N | 65° |
| Best imaging months | Nov, Dec, Jan |
How to image Cigar Galaxy
Cigar Galaxy sits in the constellation Ursa Major at right ascension 09h 55m 55s and declination +69° 40' 48". To frame and integrate it well, AstroPlanner will compute the optimal moonless window for tonight from your location, the field-of-view fit against your sensor and focal length, the suggested total integration time given your aperture and sky Bortle class, and a cloud-aware schedule that drops it from the plan if your nearest cloud forecast spike overlaps the best altitude window. As a galaxy, Cigar Galaxy needs the darkest skies you can find: surface brightness, not just apparent magnitude, drives whether it will lift out of the gradient.